Read this excellent post by James Hong, co-founder of the nearly seven year-old startup HotorNot. He talks about the history of the startup, and touches on where it might be going in the future.
A lot of this I wrote about last month after interviewing Hong, but there’s lot of additional information that people will find fascinating. The company never raised venture capital, and was throwing off a significiant amount of cash early on. As free dating competitors emerged, however, the popularity of the site declined. They responded by going free as well (killing a $500,000/month revenue stream), and traffic has doubled to around 20 million daily page views.
HotorNot is now looking more like a traditional startup - they’ve converted to a C corporation and are giving stock options to employees. That suggests a sale or venture financing might be coming up in the near future. Of course, the amount of fun that Hong and cofounder Jim Young are having.
My favorite stat about HotorNot: Up to ten marriages per day can be tracked to couples who originally met at the site.
In a sense, it is sort of like a DIGG for strangers, based on their appearance.
i like these guys - and their startup idea…so popular, yet so simple and novel in nature.
this is a true entrepreneury success story
These guys are true Internet legends. I bet they get more chicks than Brad Pitt… ha
Cheers,
Aidan Henry
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
And they’re young too!
Simple and easy to use… It would pay any new startup to keep things simple for the end user.
Ensuring people ‘get’ the product or service is surely a large part of the success of any business and is certainly a key ingredient for critical mass.
Ten marriages per day. wow!
I dunno. I’ve heard that 10 marriages a day thing before, and my BS detector goes way up.
Think about it, you know a lot of people. Do you know anyone who’s even gotten a date through Hot or Not? Not married, just a date?
I love to see - people give it all away again -
- redesign their company -
- Reward their employees or the vaule add to the company -
- Become bigger than they ever were - That is beautiful
everybody doing a little bit of homework (compete etc.) can see that they are nowhere generating 20M page views/day.
There’s also no buzz about their new features besides in blogs listing bubble after bubble.
Arrington,
Your voice is big enough now that you need to pay more attention to grammar in Tech Crunch posts.
I’ve read too many sentences like this, “Of course, the amount of fun that Hong and cofounder Jim Young are having.”
I love your insight and analysis, but please do your readers this favor.
Thanks!
Are you kidding me?
you can’t just apply C corporation right away. With C corporation, you pay huge fees, and numberous tax fees. I think they should apply S corporation instead of C corporation.
I may have mentioned this before on a TC post - can’t remember - but I am one of those marriages from Hot or Not.
I was stationed at Eielson AFB in Fairbanks, AK, and some buddies and I were goofing off on the Meet Me portion of the site. We came across one girl who said she was coming up to Fairbanks for the summer and looking for people to show her around and just hang out with. I literally had no option but to throw down the credit card so I could message her.
A buddy and I were waiting when they pulled into their apartment to help them unpack and move in - for the next 5 months we were attached at the hip - and we were married on Dec 15, 2005.
We’re now living in beautiful southern California, we have an adorable 9-month old girl, and paying for Hot or Not was easily one of the best decisions of my life.
It was kind of weird telling my friends and family how we met though…
I think they should have a “divorce tracker” link…..for all these superficial marriages doomed to failure
You know you’re in a bubble when the business of selling goods and services to customers can’t compete with the business of selling companies to investors.
this is way too web 1.0. and plenty of plentyoffish out there way better than hotornot. hotornot is just trying to come out from dead pool and catch up with other free dating sites. as you can see on alexa, after the fee was lifted in April, the site got a nice spike. But soon after the traffic was down sharply. and they had to implement a new strategy in June to boost another spike. but the spikes are not sustainable. when people are talking about hotornot, they are talking about 1999. hotornot is certainly a legend, but it’s a past legend.
Michael in #12: Way to go! Marriage and fatherhood are great.
I wasn’t trying to denegrate anyone’s marriage, I just didn’t know of any. Now I’ve heard of one. If they really have more than 3,000 per year, I think we would know about it.
#13: Shame on you. Michael told us about his great story, and you call him “superficial.” Shame shame shame.
Tim - great line. Right on.
Yuck. Sorry.
“Up to ten marriages per day can be tracked to couples who originally met at the site.”
“Up to” means that it could be zero, too, so this is a useless statistic.
What I want to know is:
1. How many hookups?
2. How many divorces?
Patricia: yuck? How quickly you forget the virtual flower you bought me.
seven years old is not a startup.
The funny thing about HOTorNOT is that we traditionally undercount metrics when talking about them. The numbers given out in my posts are all accurate, and i’m not doing any handwaving like #19 suggests.
Scott, I understand your skepticism based on the fact that you don’t know anyone that has married off our site..but it quite simply boils down to the fact that by virtue of you hanging out on TC, you are not likely to know that many people on our site.. based on demographics.
That, and the fact that in truth, 7,000 people a year is not that many. If I said “here is a list of 50,000 people in the world”, the odds you know even 1 person on it are fairly low. Even if I took that to the United States, which has about 300 million people, the odds are pretty low.
We have over 500,000 people using the dating part of HOTorNOT at any given time, and we flow through multiples of that per year. Just by virtue of scale, 10 marriages a day is cool, but actually not that amazing (once you consider the scale of the site).
But from a personal satisfaction standpoint, 10 marriages a day is very cool to us, and makes us feel our work is worthwhile.
..hate to be judgemental, but 10 marriages/day as a result of this svc doesnt bode well for the ever increasing divorce rate, which by the way, approaches 70% within first 5yrs of marriage here in the U.S.
@drama, hehe. You make me laugh
Lots of people I respect like hot or not, but I don’t like it, and that’s to no offense to anyone, of course. I’ve known some women who have had bad experiences with it, where their photos were posted by other people and then used as a form to harass them, etc. It was years ago but I’ve never been a fan since.
James,
Thanks for coming on here and commenting.
I do hang out on TC, but I also interact with real people. I know a bunch who have met through Match or one of the others, but I’ve never heard of any, until today. (I’ve personally set up three couples who got married, and I always ask how people met.)
Given what Michael up in post #12 says, perhaps people are just telling me they met on Match.com or by chance when it was really HotOrNot.
Whatever works.
James, Good luck with your new strategy, and let Mike and all of us TC readers know how it goes.
Scott,
Match.com tends to attract the 25 and older demographic.
HOTorNOT’s audience is strongly in the under 25 category..
I’m not sure how old the people you interact with are, but perhaps that is why you haven’t come across HOTorNOT. The factor you mention is also a plausible explanation.
cheers
james
Perhaps if numnuts Nemrut spent more time reading ‘ real life” news he would know that for the first time since ww2, the divorce rate has dipped well below 50%. And for the record, I think most guys who visit Hot or Not are looking for T & A, not a bride.
Dominic
These guys are hardly legends… But they think they are, oy.
Dominic, the number of divorces has declined due to lower rates of marriage since wwii. however the rates of divorce among those that do marry has dramatically increased since wwii.
Jim and James oughta read the “4 Hour Work Week”!! I don’t understand why they would walk away from that kind of cash flow and why they couldn’t find a staff member or two who could keep the site going with little oversight.
James, thanks for taking the time to post. I was wondering about that marriage stat but as you explained it TC readers usually are not the best judge of success in some situations.
These guys are smart and master marketers. I admire what they have built. They adapt quickly to changes. They were one of the first companies to get their application onto the facebook platform.
The Hot or Not facebook application now has over 1,180,000 users on facebook. They are already monetizing their facebook integration.
You can see the rating and review of their facebook integration here:
http://facereviews.com/2007/06.....hot-or-not
Cheers,
Rodney Rumford
I’ve come across a new, disgusting thing on the site: Coded racism. Theres a lot of people with racist-related things in their profile text. But since nobody moderates the site anymore, or at least nobody who understands American slang (i.e. the site probably got outsourced to India), this crap will remain on the site.